High school is rough.

Students come here for about 35 hours a week, but it dictates how they spend their entire lives until they graduate.

There’s a whole lot that can stress students out, so why do they insist on making it more difficult for themselves?

The most pressure you’re going to feel while in high school is self-inflicted.

“I need to get an A in this class. That’s the only way I will get into my dream college.”

No. Your dream college is going to put you into crippling debt, and you don’t need to get an A.

You should never need to get an A in a class. What you do need to do is become a well-rounded person who knows how to prioritize things.

People who focus only on school become so imbalanced that they crumble once they get to college because it’s so different.

Or maybe it doesn’t happen until they get out into the real world. Being able to cram for a test has very few real-world applications.

Why do you think so many people end up working at a corner store, putting their degrees to no use at all?

According to a 2014 study performed by careerbuilder.com, 51 percent of college graduates are employed in a job that does not require a college degree.

More often than not, those people are the ones whose goals were to get the grades, to get their degrees.

They didn’t learn what they needed to learn in school. They focused on the grades they were supposed to get rather than the lessons they were supposed to learn.

These are the kind of habits you should develop long before leaving for higher education.

The things you can do in high school stretch far beyond the classroom. Maintaining a social life is key to your development as a person.

People who work in college admissions always talk about how the ideal student not only does well in school but is involved in extracurricular activities.

A friend of mine asked me whether she should spend time studying for her test in an AP class or go with her friends to volunteer with a local charity.

I told her that she should absolutely volunteer.

Go out, interact with people. A college is going to be much more impressed with a student who got a B+ in a hard class while maintaining a balanced schedule than it would be with a student who stayed at home studying to get an A-.

Your goal should be to learn things that will help you in life.

A lot of that comes from being outside of the classroom, and a lot of it is in what teachers have to say. But none of it comes from staying up until 4 a.m. studying flash cards.